Some people are excellent at winning rounds inside a game that should no longer be played.

They hit the metric while damaging the business. They win the argument while losing trust. They optimize the roadmap while the category shifts. They protect their function while the company needs a new operating model.

Live players know when to stop trying to win the round and start changing the game.

What “the game” means

The game is the set of goals, constraints, incentives, rules, narratives, metrics, and power relationships that define what counts as a good move.

Most work happens inside the game. That is normal. But when the game itself is misaligned with reality, better execution only accelerates the wrong outcome.

Signals the game needs changing

Watch for these:

  • Local wins produce global damage.
  • Everyone can explain why the system is broken, but each actor is behaving rationally.
  • The metric is improving while customer or employee trust is degrading.
  • The official owner lacks the authority to solve the problem.
  • Cross-functional issues keep being treated as personality conflicts.
  • The company keeps adding process around a bad premise.
  • The market has changed but internal success criteria have not.

These are not execution problems. They are game-design problems.

The operating move

To change the game, define the current one first:

  • What are people optimizing for?
  • What are they avoiding?
  • What counts as winning?
  • What behavior does the current system make rational?
  • What outcome do we actually need now?
  • Which rule, metric, owner, or consequence must change to make that outcome rational?

Then propose a concrete game change. Not “we need better alignment.” Say: “Expansion revenue is being optimized by Sales, but implementation quality is paid by CS. We need a shared quality gate before signature, and deals that fail it should not count toward the same commission rate.”

Now the conversation has teeth.

Start with the local game

Most people cannot change the whole company, market, or category on command. That does not make them powerless. A live player often starts by changing a local game: the team’s meeting standard, the customer feedback loop, the quality bar, the handoff rule, the incentive on one motion, the way decisions are written down, the prototype that makes a new path visible.

Local game changes matter because they prove a different reality can exist. They also create evidence. Instead of arguing abstractly that the company should work differently, you can show a smaller system producing better behavior.

The cost of aliveness

Changing the game creates discomfort. It exposes fake constraints. It asks awkward questions. It makes some inherited rituals look obsolete. It may reveal that a “rule” was mostly a habit, a political truce, or a way to avoid accountability.

That does not mean the live player should enjoy disruption. If you enjoy making everyone uncomfortable, check yourself. The point is not to be provocative. The point is to make reality actionable.

Live player or loose cannon?

The difference is responsibility. A loose cannon constantly reframes, rejects process by default, surprises people unnecessarily, and treats legibility as a tax paid by lesser minds.

A live player may challenge the frame, but they make the challenge usable. They name the current game, show evidence that it is failing, propose a better rule or loop, and accept consequences for the change they advocate.

If people cannot tell whether you are creating clarity or just creating motion, you are not yet operating as a live player.

Game changes create losers

If nobody loses comfort, status, autonomy, budget, or plausible deniability, you probably have not changed the game. You have only renamed it.

Live players do not seek enemies, but they are not shocked by resistance. A game exists because it benefits someone, protects someone, or stabilizes something. Change requires acknowledging that.

The art is to make the new game more legitimate than the old one.

Sometimes the honest conclusion is that this environment will not permit the necessary game change. Then the live move may be to build sovereignty: reduce dependency, move to a healthier arena, or leave. Staying alive does not require martyrdom to a dead local game.

Winning rounds is useful. Changing the game is rarer. It is also where live-player-ness becomes visible.